Hundreds of jubilant Syrians converged on Damascus’s landmark Umayyad Mosque for Friday prayers, waving opposition flags and chanting — a sight unimaginable every week in the past earlier than rebels ousted president Bashar al-Assad.
Households with youngsters combined with armed and uniformed Islamist fighters to have fun the primary Friday prayers since Assad’s overthrow, later streaming into the Outdated Metropolis’s streets and squares.
The scenes had been harking back to the early days of the 2011 rebellion, when pro-democracy protesters in Syrian cities would take to the streets after Friday prayers — however not within the capital Damascus, lengthy an Assad clan stronghold.
Former insurgent fighters allowed girls and kids to pose with their assault rifles for celebratory photographs, as relieved residents milled across the sq. earlier than the mosque, a spot of worship because the Iron Age and town’s biggest mosque because the eighth century.
“We’re gathering as a result of we’re blissful Syria has been freed, we’re blissful to have been liberated from the jail by which we lived,” stated Nour Thi al-Ghina, 38.
“That is the primary time we’ve got converged in such massive numbers and the primary time we’re seeing such an occasion,” she stated, beaming with pleasure.
“We by no means anticipated this to occur.”
Insurgent fighter Mohammed Shobek, 30, got here to town with the victorious Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group (HTS), and posed for footage with native youngsters with a rose within the barrel of his Kalashnikov assault rifle.
“We have completed the conflict in Syria and began praying for peace, we began carrying flowers, we began constructing this nation and constructing it hand in hand,” he instructed AFP.
In 2011, Assad’s crackdown on peaceable protesters triggered a 13-year civil conflict that tore Syria aside, killing greater than half one million folks and displacing tens of millions extra.
– ‘Syrian folks is one’ –
Exhilarated crowds chanted: “One, one, one, the Syrian folks is one!”
Many held the Syrian independence flag, utilized by the opposition because the rebellion started.
Dozens of road distributors across the mosque had been promoting the three-star flags — which none would dare to lift in government-held areas throughout Assad’s iron-fisted rule.
Footage of people that had been disappeared or detained in Assad’s prisons held on the mosque’s outer partitions, the telephone numbers of kin inscribed on the pictures.
On the core of the system Assad inherited from his father Hafez was a brutal advanced of prisons and detention centres used to get rid of dissent by jailing these suspected of stepping away from the ruling Baath occasion line.
Battle monitor the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights stated in 2022 that greater than 100,000 folks had died within the prisons since 2011.
Earlier Friday, the chief of the Islamist rebels that took energy, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani — who now makes use of his given title Ahmed al-Sharaa — had urged folks to take to the streets to have fun “the victory of the revolution”.
Final month, insurgent forces led by Jolani’s HTS launched a lightning offensive, seizing Damascus and ousting Assad in lower than two weeks.
The group has now named considered one of its personal, Mohammad al-Bashir, as interim prime minister in a post-war transitional authorities till March 1. On Friday he addressed worshippers on the Umayyad Mosque.
– ‘Victory of the revolution’ –
Omar al-Khaled, 23, stated he had rushed from HTS’s northwestern stronghold of Idlib, lower off from authorities areas for years, to see the capital for the primary time in his life.
“It was my dream to come back to Damascus,” the tailor stated.
“I can not describe my emotions. Our morale could be very excessive and we hope that Syria will head in the direction of a greater future,” he stated, including: “Individuals had been stifled… however now the doorways have opened to us.”
On Thursday, the interim authorities vowed to institute the “rule of regulation” after years of abuses below Assad.
Amani Zanhur, a 42-year-old professor of pc engineering, stated a lot of her college students had disappeared in Assad’s prisons and that she was overjoyed to be attending the prayers within the new Syria.
“There could be nothing worse than what was. We can’t concern the scenario,” she instructed AFP, expressing assist for a state based mostly on Islamic teachings.
Hundreds flocked to the close by Umayyad Sq., elevating an enormous insurgent flag on its landmark sword monument and chanting.
“Let’s not talk about particulars which may separate us now and focus solely on what brings us collectively: our hatred for Bashar al-Assad,” stated Amina Maarawi, 42, an Islamic preacher carrying a white hijab.
